Abstract
ABSTRACTAfter more than sixty years of almost complete silence about its role in the Second World War, Hungary managed to find an officially satisfactory and morally uplifting story of the country’s involvement in the war. One of the central squares of Budapest offers a vivid, sensual, and tangible demonstration of both the futile past efforts of coming to grips with a difficult past and the unexpected recent solution. The square, its monuments and artefacts provide a spatial trace of historical and historiographical contentions and controversies of the past decades and the future to come.
Highlights
In front of the embassy, there are two more monuments: the grim, uninspiring statue of Harry Hill Bandholtz, the largely forgotten brigadier general of the US Army, who arrived in Hungary in August 1919, as a member of the Inter-Allied Control Commission, primarily to supervise the disengagement of occupying Romanian troops after the First World War
An architectural historian looking at the buildings and the monuments that populate the square today would say: eclecticism
The embassy building is protected by a heavy metal fence, as if it were locked in a cage, opposite the Soviet liberation monument, erected above the graves of unknown soldiers of the Soviet Red Army, to commemorate the liberation of the city from the Nazis and their Hungarian allies after the Second World War
Summary
Krisztián Ungváry, “Mítoszok a Don-kanyarról” (Myths about the Bend of the Don), HVG online, 17 January 2013, accessed 2 March 2013. The text comes from the so called “House of Terror,” a museum, a memorial, opened in 2002 by the first Orbán government, to commemorate, to remind of the double occupation of Hungary, that started with the betrayal of Hungary by the Germans in the course of the Second World War. As the new historical monographs argue,[21] the Germans betrayed Hungary on the Russian front, where the brave Hungarian soldiers were sent to the most dangerous frontlines at the River Don, in 1942, and mercilessly let the Hungarian soldiers to freeze to death in the harsh winter as German military vehicles were not allowed to carry the withdrawing Hungarians to the rear, and the supposed German allies (the good Hungarian soldiers) were prevented from spending the icy nights in the cottages of the villages occupied by German officers, who took care to arrive before the withdrawing Hungarian army.
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